I don't think there's any malicious intent. In my demographic, (almost) all events are set up through FB because your friend graph, mass-invites, and guest lists are built in.

My flatmate's boyfriend is fond of throwing large house parties with hundreds of invitees, then hiring a doorman to check names off against the FB RSVP list. If you're not on it, you're not admitted.

My closest friends remember me and send me invites via email, but I can't fault them for forgetting now and then.

Since killing my account (because they kept resetting my privacy settings to public... bastards) I've outsourced my Facebook Birthday/Party monitoring to my girlfriend.

It's risky to own lots of stock in your employer because you losing your job would be more likely to come at a time when your investments were worth less. It's risky to let your SO handle too much of your social life for similar reasons.

I'm very close to my wife and can't imagine getting a divorce, but I think it's healthy that we manage our own social calendars.

I'm similar to BWStearns, I let my girlfriend monitor facebook for events, we often both get invited to events where only one of us attend or one of us is invited by the other isn't. That's not to say she manages my calendar. We have both our own GCals (viewable by the other) and a shared GCal, we've had a long standing agreement that if we book anything in our own calendar attendance by the other is not expected and our shared calendar is attendance optional unless otherwise specified.

Not to be totally pessimistic, but that's probably potentially even more dangerous than trusting all that data to Facebook...

I didn't mean to imply maliciousness -- rather to draw a line between the sorts of friend-of-a-friend-of-an-ex-coworker parties you might miss out on for not being on Facebook, and a party of an actual friend you know and spend time with.

In short: pointing to the line between friends and "friends" and (likely my personality coloring the value judgment) thus questioning whether you're actually missing out by not being so closely connected to those "friends".

(Frankly the very concept of a house party with so many attendees that don't actually know one another, that a door man and a guest list is required, sounds like a caricature of a straw man I might have cooked up to have a laugh at "things you might need FB to get invited to". But maybe that's just saying more about me and why I don't grok or value things like FB.)

I've talked to a few people who were sending out their wedding invitations and were legitimately worried about accidentally missing someone on their Facebook friends list or forgetting about someone who doesn't use Facebook.

It's definitely naive to think "oh, if you're really friends with them you'll remember their name without the help of a computer." This is especially the case with larger more inclusive weddings where now-disconnected friends are invited.

I think its more "if the party is of a certain size you don't notice who isn't there." so for acquaintances, dropping off FB can drop you out of a lot of invites.

That said, I find it challenging to remember my immediate families birthdays (not to mention, anniversaries etc) and while my crutch has always been a calendar, FB can provide that crutch for folks who don't have a calendar habit.

Bottom line is that the core premise of FB is actually quite sound, its just not easily monetizable. Its possible that after a while folks would pay to subscribe to a FB like service but long before that Google or someone else who isn't being held against the wall with a share certificate pointed at their head may find a more workable solution.

And of course FB could, their are a lot of smart folks over there.